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Chapter Text

Tharkay is the only one on the Reliant who is not already tied to a position, and so he is the one who is chosen to harness the dragonet when it hatches. He does not mind, per se — he was bound for England in any case — but it complicates matters somewhat to have a dragon in tow; at the very least, it will now be significantly more complicated when inevitably he has to leave the country.

— “Why are you frowning?” the dragon asks, and Tharkay searches for a response that is both truthful and tactful. It is a skill he has not exercised in some time.

“I have never seen a dragon-hatching before,” he lands on after a few seconds, and then when the dragonet frowns, “You are quite welcome, of course, merely unexpected.”

There is a moment of quiet, in which the dragonet seems quite fascinated with Tharkay. He forces himself to hold still. “What is your name?” the dragonet asks.

“My name is Tenzing Tharkay.”  It is customary, Tharkay is aware, for an aviator to name their dragon, but given his own history he feels that he should at least ask. “What should I call you?”

The dragonet pauses for several moments, considering. “I do not know,” he says. “I do not know that I had a name. Would you like to give me one?”

Tharkay does not have a name in mind, but — “Akshaya,” he says. “It means enduring; I have heard it used of mountains.”

The dragonet nods decisively. “That is a good name,” Akshaya says. “Now, do you have any food?”

Tharkay has held himself apart from the sailors for the entirety of this journey thus far; this does not change after Akshaya’s hatching, and Tharkay does not wish it to.

Akshaya — who is still small enough that he can curl up in Tharkay’s lap, though in a week he will not be — seems to feel differently. “Why do they avoid you?” Akshaya asks, his head cocked to one side. “It does not seem right.”

Tharkay weighs his options and elects not to explain the finer points of British prejudice to a week-old dragon. “I prefer it this way,” he says instead. “I have always valued solitude. The company of other humans drains, eventually.” This is true enough; he can elaborate further on land, where privacy is somewhat more than a genteel fiction.

It does not seem to be enough of an explanation for Akshaya, which is good, because it means that he is paying attention to the world around him.

“There must be more to it than that,” he says. It is almost a question, but not quite.

“There is,” Tharkay tells him. “But I will explain more when we will not be heard.”

Akshaya nods, and nudges Tharkay's shoulder with his head.

They try to take Akshaya away from him, of course; Tharkay expected nothing else. Tharkay does not bother to remember the aviator’s name, but he sneers at Tharkay and remarks, as if neither of them can hear, that Akshaya’s name will be replaced with something more suitable.

Akshaya rejects the new name, calls the aviator a dirty liar, and declares that he would rather have Tharkay than anybody in the entire Aerial Corps, and if anyone tries to replace his captain he will squash them. Tharkay couldn't be prouder. The aviator, whose name Tharkay still does not care about, is furious.

They arrive at the covert in February, and Tharkay holds himself apart from the beginning — Akshaya may bristle at the sight of Tharkay alone by choice, but that is better than Akshaya bristling at their explicit rejection. There are other dragons here, and some of them are even larger than Akshaya; Tharkay privately thinks that being humbled is good for him, but does not say this out loud.

After a week, one of the other captains starts joining him. Captain Little — very small, very intelligent, very pretty, and very quiet — sits by Tharkay at meals and joins him in Akshaya’s clearing and draws and writes reports and does not try to speak with him.

“What on Earth are you doing?” Tharkay asks after two days of this, when they are out of Akshaya’s clearing and on their way inside.

Without missing a beat Captain Little says, “Making sure that you know you’re welcome, whatever certain captains of certain courier-weights —” Tharkay snorts at the obvious jab at Rankin, who had called him several exceedingly impolite names before Akshaya had snarled loud enough and close enough to make the trees shake — “have to say about it.”

“You realise, of course, that I am a half-blooded foreigner, and that association with me in unlikely in the extreme to improve your standing in the Corps,” Tharkay says. There is no way that Captain Little does not realise it, but even in the case that he somehow has managed to remain ignorant a reminder cannot hurt; better that Little leave now than that he pretend to friendship for any longer.

“And I’m an invert Jew,” Little says, as if it were perfectly natural to say so aloud to a man whom one has known for less than a week. “Do you have any particular point?”

…perhaps it is true, then, what they say in English society of aviators. Captain Harcourt’s presence would seem to suggest so, but Tharkay had thought he knew better than to raise his hopes. They are still Englishmen, after all.

“And can I expect a similar welcome from your colleagues, Captain Little the invert Jew?” Tharkay says. He cannot keep the note of challenge out of his voice; he does not truly try.

Little winces. “Some of them. Chenery and Granby, Berkeley and Harcourt, Roland, Warren, Ferris, maybe Sutton — yes. The others, probably not. The Admiralty, certainly not.”

It is an honest answer, if not a perfect one, and Tharkay is willing to take it.

Tharkay and Akshaya are placed in a formation with a Longwing by the name of Lily, whose captain is a woman named Harcourt. Nobody speaks of this but certain captains of certain courier-weights, but Tharkay would have guessed even without Rankin sneeringly addressing a superior officer as “Miss.” Harcourt is the first aviator so far, Little included, to raise no eyebrows at a dragon named Akshaya; Tharkay is inclined to like her for that reason alone. Berkeley is friendly enough, which Tharkay takes as a sign that Little was probably right about the other captains, but Granby was friends with Dayes and it seems that the dislike has carried over.

It hardly signifies. All in all, the society of aviators is more comfortable than he had expected it to be — but that does not mean, however, that holding still does not itch. That staying in England does not itch.

Tharkay takes Akshaya flying as often as is feasible, balances on his dragon’s back in lieu of a harness and laughs into the wind. But the sheer number of days that stretch ahead of him in which he will return to the same building, take the same routes to the same places, is enough to make Tharkay long for the desert and the open sky, long for the snow and the thin mountain air, long for anything that is not rolling green hills and the memory of his father’s family.

He tells none of this to Akshaya, of course, nor to anyone else.

The is a battle in Dover, in which Akshaya is brilliant and Tharkay wears impassion like a cloak rather than a mask; he can enjoy fighting to a limited extent, but he has never liked battle in the way that his dragon seems to.

The important part, in Tharkay's estimation, is that the dragon-expert was incorrect. Akshaya is not an Imperial, he is a Celestial, intended for Napoleon —

— In this light, Tharkay is hardly surprised when the Chinese demand that Akshaya be sent back to China.

“It's a good thing you're his captain,” Chenery says, and then adds “You know the language already, if nothing else,” when Little glares at him. Tharkay cannot disagree with this; although he is certainly not from China, he does already speak Mandarin. More importantly, so does Akshaya, although Tharkay isn’t sure that he wants the English to know that he started to teach his dragon Chinese as soon as he heard the word “Imperial”.

Tharkay isn’t sure that he wants the English to know any number of things.

Chapter Text

After nearly a month of stubborn silence from Tharkay and loud protest from Akshaya, they set sail for China in November.

The English aviators and the Chinese delegates hate one another, and each nation implicitly expects Tharkay to take the opposing side; the majority of the Englishmen in his acquaintance still believe that Tharkay is Chinese, if only because he has never deemed it worth his time to correct them, but the actual Chinese can tell that he speaks Mandarin with an outsider’s accent. There is very little that can be done about that, Tharkay has found — but in the meantime he remains carefully neutral, Akshaya attempts to take both sides at once, Hammond alienates everybody onboard, and of course the sailors despise them all.

“Tell me about your ancestry,” Prince Yongxing says in Mandarin, just after they cross the equator. It is not a request, and Tharkay did not expect one. The Chinese delegation considers him beneath them nearly as much as the Englishmen do. “I don’t suppose you have any royal blood?”

“Not Chinese royalty,” he says, “My mother was from Nepal.” He does not mention that she was a villager who married an Englishman — let Prince Yongxing make his own assumptions there.

Yongxing sighs, not even bothering to hide his disdain. “Better than a Westerner, I suppose.”

The infuriating thing is, Tharkay cannot disagree — it is better that Akshaya have him for a captain than an Englishman, if the Chinese are so set on having their Celestial back. That does not make it sting less, to be looked down upon by two nations at once.

Akshaya, who Tharkay has kept carefully unaware of this, is fascinated with everything the Chinese have to offer him, from their poetry to their history to what little they are willing to tell him in Tharkay’s hearing of their battle-tactics. This is only fair — it is his birth country, for all that he has never seen it, and there will always be a place in Tharkay’s heart for the mountains no matter how long he is away from Nepal — but he resents Yongxing’s attempts to coax Akshaya away from him all the same.

“Akshaya,” Tharkay says, as he settles on the dragon deck, after Yongxing has finished with whatever it was he was saying but while he is still in earshot. “Would you like to learn Nepali?”

It is a power play, and an obvious one at that. There is no way that Yongxing will not see it, but if Akshaya notices he doesn’t seem to care; he is simply excited about a new language and a new history to learn. He’s a joy to teach, just as he was when learning Mandarin in the covert — he picks up phrases within minutes of hearing them, his accent is nearly perfect after two days, and his enthusiasm would be contagious if Tharkay did not already share it. It has been entirely too long since he last had occasion to speak his native language.

Tharkay takes great, private pride in how stable his voice is as he teaches Akshaya how to say I love you.

Just before reaching Africa there is a message from Volly — he carries a letter from Little, which essentially says that the covert is very dull without Tharkay, and news from the dragons Lily’s formation, who say that they miss Akshaya very much and hope that the Chinese do not keep him long. Akshaya’s resulting sickness looks very much like what Tharkay knows in humans as a common cold, but from the way that Akshaya complains he suspects that there is something more to it. When the sickness finally dissipates just after Africa he is more grateful than he can reasonably express without seeming overly sentimental; it was only a cold, in the end.

In Africa there is — it is not a fight. A pirate ship raiding a slave-port, with a captain whose face makes Captain Riley flinch. Before they can do anything to try to stop him, he is gone, and more than half the slaves with him.

“At least that man acted,” Akshaya tells Tharkay, and he does not speak as quietly as he thinks he does. “I would not have liked to have stopped him, even if we could have, and even if he was a pirate.”

Riley looks furious, but Tharkay leans closer to Akshaya and says, more quietly than Akshaya but still perfectly audible, “Nor would I.”

Tharkay has seen China in the past, but typically he crosses the western border, rather than landing on the coast. While they’re waiting in port Tharkay brushes up on Portuguese, flaunts his knowledge of the language in front of the English and the Chinese alike.

Orders arrive within three days of their landing from Peking, which is two thousand miles away. “How in the world does any letter move that quickly,” Lieutenant Ferris says, face wrinkled with confusion, and Tharkay knows exactly how but does not tell him. There are some things that are always more enjoyable to watch people find out on their own.

Akshaya is delighted with China; Tharkay is not surprised by this, after the way he reacted to Prince Yongxing. Emily Roland reacts almost exactly the same way Tharkay himself did when he saw England for the first time: with awe. He brings her to Peking with himself and Ferris, rather than leaving her behind with Granby, and he cannot say that he regrets it.

Tharkay has done business in China before, but even with that experience, Peking is startlingly beautiful - or at least, the part of it that they are allowed to see is. Tharkay suspects that the rest of the city is not nearly as idyllic, and the other dragons’ treatment of Lien only solidifies that impression; she sticks out from the other dragons as much as Tharkay sticks out from a crowd of Englishmen, and she holds herself apart from them just as he does.

Qian calls Akshaya “Xiang,” and Tharkay does not like the hot thick jealousy that rises in him. It is not a claim on Akshaya to call him by the name he was born with, Tharkay reminds himself, over and over again, and then, I should have named him in his own tongue, and not in mine, and then, when was the last time I grew this attached to anyone?

But perhaps it is not surprising, that a dragon can do what men cannot. Tharkay does not know if he likes what it says about him that he is surprised anyway.

Then, of course, the murder attempts begin.

Tharkay honestly is uncertain of why they had not come earlier, not that the sentiment is one he cares to voice; surely it would have been simpler to push him over the side of the Allegiance than to engage in siege now. One of Akshaya’s harness-men comes away with a broken neck, Ferris comes away with a bullet in his shoulder, and Tharkay comes away with the knowledge that Sun Kai, at the least, can be relied upon.

Akshaya did not appear during the whole of the battle.

“If you wish to stay in China, of course I will not stop you,” Tharkay tells Akshaya when he finally does return, far away from Hammond’s hearing. “I can live anywhere you choose.”

He carefully does not suggest leaving Akshaya entirely. If Akshaya chooses separation then that is simply how it will have to be, but Tharkay will not bring it up himself.

Akshaya nudges Tharkay’s shoulder, surprisingly gentle for his size. “I would miss Lily and Maximus,” he says, “and you would miss Little, and we would both miss the covert. And I do not want to not fight, when all our friends are fighting.”

It is not quite I want to stay with you, but Tharkay has always been good at reading between the lines.

The Chinese emperor adopts Tharkay as his son. It is not a solution that Tharkay would have thought of, but it is a perfectly good one; he imagines the reactions of his father’s family, should they ever find out, and nearly collapses laughing.

There is, of course, a celebration afterwards. Something about the crowd sets Tharkay on edge, and so he makes sure to stay near Akshaya — halfway through the play there is a knife in Tharkay's shoulder and he does not know how it got there, only that he cannot feel his left arm and he does not seem to be bleeding much and he is suddenly very dizzy — Akshaya is screaming and Lien is screaming and there is a fight and the stage-set comes crashing down —

— somewhere in between, Tharkay's vision fuzzes and Ferris’s voice is very distant and the world goes dark.

Chapter Text

When Tharkay leaves China, he is the prince of a country that does not want him and never has. Akshaya preens over it, and Tharkay does not ask him to stop. The respect would be wonderful, if he did not know that it is hollow.

It lasts for all of perhaps a month before the ship catches fire.

Macao is a perfectly decent place to be stranded with a dragon. More than that, it is very nearly Tharkay’s home turf, and it is not the Englishmen’s; he takes a spiteful sort of joy in slipping through alleyways and speaking in rapid Portuguese with shopkeepers who he knows and they do not.

Tharkay could take his crew to Istanbul over land. He has walked the route before, and he could walk it again, almost wishes to. But a dragon requires more water than a man, and so Tharkay is reluctant to bring Akshaya across the desert, however well he knows the way, and so they stay in the city for five days before another ship comes in: a dragon-transport with a flag of a nation that Tharkay is quite sure does not exist, a crew made up of men and women of all colors, a blond captain with no uniform whose face is strangely familiar, and no dragon.

The captain approaches Tharkay and Ferris in a merchant’s stall the day after ship arrives, his footsteps loud on the cobblestones. “I have been informed that you were in need of a dragon-transport to Istanbul,” he says, refreshingly straightforward after so much time spent around politicians, and he reaches out to shake Tharkay's hand. “Captain Will Laurence of the Bradamante, at your service.”

“You're a pirate,” Ferris says before Tharkay can reply, and suddenly Tharkay knows where he has seen that face before.

Captain Laurence does not deny it, only looks at Tharkay, waiting for a response. Tharkay looks him over, then looks him over again — the man’s clothes are threadbare but well-cared-for, and he has somehow managed to acquire a neckcloth; neither of these things were unusual for the legitimate captain that Tharkay assumed Laurence was, but for a pirate they are strange.

“You cannot seriously be considering this,” Ferris says flatly.

Tharkay gives Captain Laurence a smile that he used to call charming and Sara Madden used to call up to something. “Well,” he says, “we do need a dragon-transport.”

Tharkay's crew is somewhat less than sanguine about this turn of events, and Laurence's doesn't look happy about it either. That’s to be expected - a group of pirates willingly helping the British military is never a common sight, and Tharkay can’t imagine there is any human on the ship who does not at least halfway expect him to take Laurence prisoner as soon as they reach England.

Tharkay is inclined to like the man, mostly because of how warm he is with Akshaya; Riley had always seemed faintly irritated by Akshaya’s presence, but Laurence not only tolerates the endless questions but answers them.

It's more than just that, though. Tharkay has never met an Englishman who spoke so many different languages, has never met a man at all who could switch between languages so effortlessly as Laurence does. Tharkay could almost blend in with this crew, does blend in when he removes his uniform, and Tharkay hasn't blended in anywhere since before he boarded the Reliant.

He could get used to this.

It would be easy to get used to this.

Ferris is even quieter than usual; Tharkay supposes he cannot blame the boy, surrounded by pirates as they are, but Roland has been all but adopted by the crew, and Granby is — well.

“I'm sure Laurence would take you on as part of the crew, if you wanted to stay with your bosun,” Tharkay tells him. The dragon deck is not empty, but the loose collection of people who have congregated near Akshaya are speaking in what sounds like Tswana, and in any case it hardly signifies if they're overheard.

“Khatri's not my anything, I fell in bed with him, not in love,” Granby says, not sounding particularly heated about it. “Besides, I’m not going to leave the Corps, I'm not like you.”

Tharkay raises an eyebrow. “Not like me how?”

Granby pauses, choosing his words with more care than he generally does. “I couldn't ever not be an aviator,” he says after a moment. “I've been in the service since I was seven, my whole life is here. I don't pretend to know you well, but I've never gotten the impression that your whole life was anywhere.”

That takes Tharkay by surprise, as he had thought that nothing could. There's another silence.

“I'm sorry, for what it's worth,” Granby adds. He isn't looking at Tharkay. “For being such a prick when we met. I thought that — it doesn't matter what I thought, you clearly love Akshaya, but — you did not speak kindly to him often.”

That casts an entirely different light on Granby’s dislike of him, Tharkay thinks, and he says, “I'm sorry too. For what it’s worth.”

Granby looks startled. That was, of course, the point.

In Istanbul, they find that the sultan is impossible to reach, and his ministers are intransigent.

Normally, Tharkay would take this as his cue to do whatever he felt necessary, and then leave the city. Normally, is acting alone, and there are not two dozen other men whose lives he holds in his hands.

Tharkay waits, and hates every moment of it.

Captain Laurence makes himself difficult to find.

That's uncharitable; Tharkay doesn't actually believe that he's doing it on purpose. But it is true that it is very difficult to catch him alone, and Tharkay has some questions he would like answered, so he waits until the captain is speaking with Akshaya in one of the several African languages spoken by the crew, and stands near the pair of them and waits for Laurence to pass him.

“Why are you helping us?” Tharkay does his best to make it clear that it is not an accusation, but does not think he succeeds.

“Because I have a dragon transport, and an interest in helping the English, and you had a dragon, and were English,” Laurence says. It has the ease of truth.

Tharkay wants to say I’m Scottish, actually, just to be a prick. He restrains himself.

Still, Laurence stays. Tharkay does not understand him, and wants to understand him.

The eggs are being held in the harem — it is the sort of sentence that Tharkay would never have expected to say aloud, even less so when he has just managed to convince his men that is actually is illegal on pain of death to disturb the privacy of the women inside.

It’s a clever place to put them, he has to give the Turks that. If Tharkay were not long used to sneaking about, and if he did not have a man by his side who is likely to be executed for piracy anyway, it might even have worked.

Akshaya is not happy with Tharkay’s plan; Tharkay had not truly expected him to be, not after a man was whipped for doing something far less illegal. But he lets Tharkay go, and lets Laurence and Granby go with him.

They climb over the walls easily, Laurence after a lifetime of climbing in rigging and Tharkay after a lifetime of climbing whatever he could find. Getting past the guards is Granby’s doing; he takes the bullets out of his cartridges and throws them, then all three of them slip through the door while the guards are distracted.

The eggs are in a furnace that heats the entire room to a sauna. Granby — the only one of them who has spent any significant amount of time in a covert — pulls out the three they were promised, a lightweight and a middleweight and a fire-breather.

Climbing out is significantly more difficult than climbing in was, weighed down as they are by dragon eggs, but not impossible, and not at all loud. There is no evidence that they ever entered but the three eggs, strapped in silk harnesses to Akshaya.

The Bradamante is gone from Istanbul the next morning, and on its way to Prussia.

When they get there, Prussia is a disaster.

They're losing, and badly. The Prussians have been promised twenty dragons, of which only Akshaya has been forthcoming; Tharkay is inclined to blame the English inability to keep promises, but he can hardly say this aloud, and in any case he cannot rely on cynicism when there are worse explanations available. He remembers a group of feral dragons in the desert between Prussia and China, but there is no time — Akshaya cannot be spared, and of course Tharkay is not going to leave without him.

Laurence looks at him thoughtfully when Tharkay tells him all of this. Tharkay, for once, does not try to analyze his response.

Laurence takes his pay and leaves with the Bradamante the next morning. Tharkay cannot blame him.

One of the eggs — the Kazilik — is about to hatch.

“I can’t do this,” Ferris tells him a day after the shell hardens. They are not in front of the rest of Akshaya’s crew; possibly that is the only reason that Ferris is able to say it.

“If it’s a matter of age, Captain Harcourt was perfectly capable at twenty,” Tharkay says. He might not have been there, but it’s difficult to imagine her being anything else. “You’ve proven that you’re capable.”

“It’s not,” Ferris says, too quickly, and then, “well, it is. If I get an egg at eighteen when you have another lieutenant who’s twenty-five, every single one of Granby’s friends is going to hate me, even if he doesn’t.”

Tharkay is about to say that if Ferris values other men’s opinion so much then “— and don’t look at me like that,” Ferris adds, “connections are important, just because you somehow get on without them doesn’t mean they aren’t. I can’t be the captain this dragon deserves, and I especially can’t do it with half the Corps out for my blood.”

That, even Tharkay cannot dispute. How many times has knowing the right person saved his life?

“Thank you for bringing this up with me,” Tharkay says, clipped and impersonal. You did not speak kindly to him often, Granby’s voice echoes in his ears, and as Ferris turns to go he adds, more softly, “I’ll be proud to have you as lieutenant.”

It feels uncomfortably personal. Ferris’s smile, rare but bright, is easily worth it.

Then, of course, the egg actually hatches, and she is a holy terror.

She names herself Iskierka — little spark, fittingly enough for a Kazilik — and is immediately obsessed with prize-taking. Granby doesn’t seem to have the heart to tell her that she’s five feet long and can’t take anything.

The situation doesn’t actually change much. Akshaya is still the only dragon they have who can be taken into battle. But Iskierka’s presence seems to hearten everyone near her, and for that alone, the holy terror might just be worth it.

There is a dragon transport in port, not the Bradamante but with the same nonexistent flag, and Laurence has returned with a dozen dragons in tow.

“It is not twenty,” he says apologetically, as if Tharkay were going to censure him for singlehandedly changing the tide of the battle in Britain’s favor. “But you talked about ferals, and I have my own connections in Africa, and —”

Tharkay could kiss him. He settles for a tight embrace and a hand on Laurence’s shoulder.

“Thank you,” he says. “Thank you.”